Minion (typeface)

Minion is a seriftypeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990 for Adobe Systems and inspired by late Renaissance-era type. The name comes from the traditional naming system for type sizes, in which minion is between nonpareil and brevier, equivalent to modern 7pt type. As the name suggests, it is particularly intended as a font for body text in a classical style, neutral and practical while also slightly condensed to save space.[1] Slimbach described the design as having "a simplified structure and moderate proportions."[2][3]

Minion was developed using innovative multiple master technology to create a range of weights and styles suitable for different text sizes.[4] This automation of font creation was intended to allow a gradual trend in styles from solid, chunky designs for caption-size small print to more graceful and slender designs for headings.[5][a] It is an early member of what became Adobe's Originals program, which created a set of type families primarily for book and print use, many like Minion in a deliberately classical style.[b] Minion is a very large family of fonts, including Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, optical styles, condensed styles and stylistic alternates such as swash capitals.[8] It is one of the most popular typefaces used in books, one of the most famous being The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst's book about fine printing and page layout.[9][10]

Modern Minion releases are in the OpenType (otf) format, allowing a variety of stylistic alternates such as small caps and ligatures to be encoded in the same font. The original release used additional 'expert set' fonts for these features, and may remain used by designers using more primitive software such as Microsoft Office that have limited OpenType support.

The original release. Minion Black does not have italic counterpart. Minion Expert is a separate font package that include fonts containing small caps, ligatures, old style figures, and swash glyphs. There are also fonts for dingbats (Minion Ornaments), and a Black-weighted font (Minion Black Expert). Swash fonts are included for only the 2 lightest font weights. An 'expert set' font is used for older and simpler applications that cannot handle multiple text styles for the same letter (such as both lower-case letters and small caps) in the same font.

Minion Cyrillic was designed in 1992 by Robert Slimbach and was conceived as a non-Latin counterpart to Slimbach’s Minion typeface family. There were no Display-sized fonts, expert fonts, or Black-weighted fonts in this family.

An OpenType update of the original family, released in 2000. The update is based on Minion MM but features slight changes to the selection of instances and modifications of the font metrics.[11]

The family comes with 3 (later 4, which adds Medium) weights, each in roman and italic, 2 widths, and 4 optical sizes (not sold in all packages). The Black weight from Minion Black Expert was not included. Each font includes the expert glyphs and dingbats that were previously found in Minion Expert package (swashes available in italic fonts only), Cyrillic Glyphs from Minion Cyrillic. In addition, the font family supports Adobe CE, Adobe Western 2, Greek, Latin Extended, Vietnamese character sets.

Minion Math is a variant designed by Johannes Küster from typoma GmbH, for mathematical applications.[12][13] Minion Math family includes 20 fonts in 4 weights and 5 optical sizes each. An additional optical size 'Tiny' is added. The October 2011 version (1.020) contains about 2900 glyphs per font; it also added OpenType math features. Minion Math had a working title, typoma MnMath. The final form is expected to include all Unicode mathematical symbols and many additional symbols.

An older companion to Adobe's Minion Pro (rather than replacement) is Achim Blumensath's MnSymbol, typically (but not necessarily) used from TeX.[14] Although MnSymbol has a packaging as OpenType, it only provides TeX font metrics for math.

Many Adobe Systems reference manuals are set in Minion: PDF Reference third edition, InDesign 2.0 User Guide, FrameMaker 7.0 User Guide, etc. and Adobe ships the typeface with a number of their applications, including Adobe Reader.

^The original goal was that this would be controllable from inside applications using text, so a user could fine-tune the font to the exact form they needed (thickness, optical size, level of condensation, etc.)[6] Making apps support this proved impractical, and so instead multiple master fonts have been released in a set of styles likely to be useful.[7]